Dangerous Ages eBook

She was going away, down into Cornwall, in two days.
She would stay in rooms by herself at Marazion and
finish her book and bathe and climb, and lie in the
sun (if only it came out) and sleep and eat and drink.
There was nothing in the world like your own company;
you could be purely animal then. And in a month
Gerda and Kay were coming down, and they were going
to bicycle along the coast, and she would ask Barry
to come too, and when Barry came she would let him
say what he liked, with no more fencing, no more cover.
Down by the green edge of the Cornish sea they would
have it out—­“grip hard, become a root
...” become men as trees walking, rooted in
a quiet dream. Dream? No, reality. This
was the dream, this world of slipping shadows and
hurrying gleams of heartbreaking loveliness, through
which one roamed, a child chasing butterflies which
ever escaped, or which, if captured, crumbled to dust
in one’s clutching hands. Oh for something
strong and firm to hold. Oh Barry, Barry, these
few more weeks of dream, of slipping golden shadows
and wavering lights, and then reality. Shall
I write, thought Nan, “Dear Barry, you may ask
me to marry you now.” Impossible.
Besides, what hurry was there? Better to have
these few more gay and lovely weeks of dream.
They would be the last.

Has Barry squandered and spilt his love about as I
mine? Likely enough. Likely enough not.
Who cares? Perhaps we shall tell one another all
these things sometime; perhaps, again, we shan’t.
What matter? One loves, and passes on, and loves
again. One’s heart cracks and mends; one
cracks the hearts of others, and these mend too.
That is—­inter alia—­what
life is for. If one day you want the tale of
my life, Barry, you shall have it; though that’s
not what life is for, to make a tale about. So
thrilling in the living, so flat and stale in the
telling—­oh let’s get on and live
some more of it, lots and lots more, and let the dead
past bury its dead.

Between a laugh and a sleepy yawn, Nan jumped from
the bus at the corner of Oakley Street.

CHAPTER V

SEAWEED

1

“Complexes,” read Mrs. Hilary, “are
of all sorts and sizes.” And there was
a picture of four of them in a row, looking like netted
cherry trees whose nets have got entangled with each
other. So that was what they were like.
Mrs. Hilary had previously thought of them as being
more of the nature of noxious insects, or fibrous
growths with infinite ramifications. Slim young
trees. Not so bad, then, after all.

“A complex is characterised, and its elements
are bound together by a specific emotional tone, experienced
as feeling when the complex is aroused. Apart
from the mental processes and corresponding actions
depending on purely rational mental systems, it is
through complexes that the typical mental process
(the specific response) works, the particular complex
representing the particular set of mental elements
involved in the process which begins with perception
and cognition and ends with the corresponding conation.”